Little Russia: Street Style Star Miroslava Duma Is Larger Than Life

The diminutive, Moscow-based Miroslava Duma is an internet style star followed virtually all over the world. Mark Holgate catches up with the woman intent on a truly global reach.

In 1890 in Russia, Vasily Petrovich Zvyozdochkin, a wood carver, and Sergey Vasilyevich Malyutin, a painter, came up with the very first matryoshka, a set of nesting dolls in colorful folk dress designed to start tiny and end up big. Spend a few hours in the company of 28-year-old Miroslava Duma—or Mira, as her 200,000-plus Instagram followers know her (around 120,000 more, incidentally, than those following Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev)—and it’s easy to feel you’ve encountered a latter-day, living matryoshka. Duma may stand just a fraction over five feet in her size XS Wolford stocking soles, yet her towering online presence has made her virtually larger than life. The sheer ferocity of interest in her—take a peek at the Instagram comments on whatever new look of hers she has uploaded if you don’t believe me—can make it seem as if more and more Miras of ever-increasing magnitude are revealing themselves before your very eyes.

Who she is, to quote her Instagram account, is this: “Happy Mum, Founder of www.buro247.ru, Digital Media Director at TSUM.” For the uninitiated, this needs some deconstructing. Duma married husband Aleksey Mikheev, an entrepreneur working at the country’s ministry of trade and industry, in 2005, when they were both 20 and Duma was studying economics and international relations at Moscow State Institute of International Relations; two and a half years ago, she gave birth to a son, George. Eight months later there was another offspring: the Buro 24/7 site, which she cofounded with childhood friend Fira Chilieva, a sort of Huffington Post for style-obsessed Russians. “We cover that Net-a-Porter is launching a magazine called The Edit,” Duma tells me. “We interviewed Francis Ford Coppola when he was in Moscow. We don’t write about Kim Kardashian.”

More recently, in February, she started working with TSUM, her homeland’s answer to Neiman Marcus, doing basically what she has been doing for the last couple of years—which is to say, going to runway shows, being photographed at the shows, and having those images spread like viral wildfire round the net. Duma is leveraging her online presence to increase TSUM’s presence in the world to, as she puts it, “monetize the moment.” She is also in the midst of expanding Buro 24/7 to the former Soviet states and then on to Europe, striking sponsorship deals with Chanel, Bur­berry, Louis Vuitton, and Ralph Lauren, and planning to meet with luxury conglomerate LVMH to discuss an idea for a new iPhone app.

To anyone even vaguely familiar with the workings of today’s global fashion-media nexus, none of this might seem that unusual; many are the pretty and creatively attired girls snapped at runway shows intent on building their own brands. Duma, though, is the product of a confluence of happenings that have struck Russia in the last two decades: the rapacious embracing of capitalism, and the speedy arrival of European and American fashion brands (“Fashion is really only about fifteen years old in Russia,” she marvels) in a country that became unbelievably rich almost overnight—as did her own parents, who migrated from modest beginnings in Ukraine and ended up in Siberia just as the oil boom struck. Duma’s generation is also the first to begin to realize the promise that lay in technology. (It’s a long-standing joke between her and her husband that on an early date, when he visited her at her parents’, he saw her computer, dusty and unused, sitting on a table, a vase of flowers precariously perched on the keyboard.)

Of course, it’s her unique style that allows her to do that rare thing these days: give a jolt of surprise at how she has put herself together—even if it means, as she says, that she has to alter 99.9 percent of what she wears. During the most recent New York shows, this is what she wore: Céline’s enormous-on-anyone (but especially on her) Mondrian–color blocked coat from last fall; a Burberry striped trench with a vaguely military cap from Eugenia Kim; and a Ralph Lauren dress and jacket with a shirt from Stella McCartney. She’s also keen on personality-defining accessories—jeweled headdresses, Hermès scarves tied babushka style, and fur pom-pom corsages from one of her favorite Russian designers, Viva Vox—to amplify both her and her look.

“What works for my shape,” she says, “is a constant puzzle that I am trying to figure out. But I never had a complex to be taller. We have a saying in Russia: A small dog is a puppy until very old age.”

When I visit Duma at Hotel Le Meurice during the Paris haute couture collections in late January, her skill at carefully orchestrating what will appear best in photographs also becomes apparent. In fact, her packing for the trip is laid out as if for a shoot—which, effectively, is what her life in the public eye is. While her clothes (Valentino capes, Mary Katrantzou dresses, Ostwald Helgason tops and teeny skirts) hang on a rack, her accessories—including a quilted Chanel purse from the Paris-Moscow collection decorated, somewhat ironically, with those Communist-era relics the hammer and sickle—sit neatly laid out on her dressing table.

There’s a video she wants to show me. It’s a sketch from a British comedy program, The Fast Show, called “Women: Know Your Limits!,” on YouTube. It’s something Duma’s watched many times—a portrayal of women who have to follow their husband’s example, and who speak only if spoken to. It always makes her laugh, simply because she recognizes that while Russian society still has vestiges of its patriarchal past, she—a young female entrepreneur who has used fashion to give herself both visibility and economic freedom—doesn’t have to play by those rules. The comparison to the matryoshka still holds true—that is, if there’s a version of the Russian doll that can’t be contained and refuses to acknowledge any limits.